Defrag How Often

[Deleted User]

lemontree wrote: »

How do I do all this Bob ?

What OS have you got?

LincolnshireYokel

closed wrote: »

Once every 3 years sounds about right.

It's done automatically since vista was introduced, and is largely a complete waste of time on 99% of systems.

I agree. Its largely a waste of time on modern systems, especially SATA drives using NTFS, you might as well just reformat and reload windows at the same time, and do it all one one. And 3 years is good interval to do that.

Jamie_Cortez

One thing to note, should someone stumble in.
If you have a Solid State Drive, don't defrag it..ever.

[Deleted User]

Jamie_Cortez wrote: »

If you have a Solid State Drive, don't defrag it..ever.

Why... :huh:

Jamie_Cortez

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

Why... :huh:

Waste of time, it stores data differently to a mechanical hard drive.

A solid state stores data in flash cells.

Modern SSDs use a trick to get high random write speeds. When defragmenting, it will overwrite existing data. For example, it will put the most used applications at the beginning of the disk, as that's where HDDs are faster. But in reality, the SSD has remapped the locations to free flash cells in order to get higher performance.

So what windows thinks is the beginning of the disk, may be somewhere in the middle. The SSD is silently moving data to other flash cells without Windows or anything else ever knowing. Now here comes the trick: it has to remember where all these 'mappings' correspond to. For every I/O this 'list' needs to be referenced, to see where the data really is being stored. But with defragmenting this list can grow enormously, and this starts to hamper performance.

So if you defragment, this 'list' is getting filled up and can slowdown performance significantly.

Nearly all SSD manufacturers will now state somewhere in the documentation they do not recommend Defragging the SSD.

There are now other tools out there to perform similar functions for SSD.

-TangleFoot-

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

Why... :huh:

Short version: no moving parts, so no need to defrag.

There is no benefit to reading data sequentially (beyond typical FS block sizes), making fragmentation irrelevant for SSDs. Defragmentation would cause wear by making additional writes of the NAND flash cells, which have a limited cycle life.